Kamaga Kohei

Despite the overwhelming evidence of climate change and its effects on future generations, most individuals are still hesitant to make environmental changes that would especially benefit future generations. In this study, we investigate whether dialogue can influence people’s altruistic behavior toward future generations of humans, and how it may be affected by participant age and the appearance of the conversation partner. We used a human, an android robot called Telenoid, and a speaker as representatives of future generations. Participants were split among an old age group and a young age group and were randomly assigned to converse with one of the aforementioned representatives. We asked the participants to play a round of the Dictator Game with the representative they were assigned, followed by an interactive conversation and another round of the Dictator Game in order to gauge their level of altruism. The results show that, on average, participants gave more money after having an interactive conversation, and that older adults tend to give more money than young adults. There were no significant differences between the three representatives. The results show that empathy might have been the most important factor in the increase in altruistic behavior for all participants.

Abstract We examine the impact of Suzumura’s (Economica 43:381–390, 1976) consistency property when applied in the context of collective choice rules that are independent of irrelevant alternatives, neutral, and monotonic. An earlier contribution by Blau and Deb (Econometrica 45:871–879, 1977) establishes the existence of a vetoer if the collective relation is required to be complete and acyclical. The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities that result if completeness and acyclicity are dropped and Suzumura consistency is imposed instead. A conceptually similar but logically independent version of the combined axiom that requires the collective decision mechanism to be independent, neutral, and monotonic is employed. In the case of a finite population, we obtain an alternative impossibility theorem if a collective choice rule is assumed to be non-degenerate and a modified no veto requirement is imposed instead of Blau and Deb’s (1977) condition. If the population is countably infinite, the impossibility can be avoided but it resurfaces if our new no veto property is extended to a coalitional variant.

Abstract This paper provides an axiomatic analysis of sufficientarian social evaluation. Sufficientarianism has emerged as an increasingly important notion of distributive justice. We propose a class of principles that we label generalized critical-level sufficientarian orderings. The distinguishing feature of our new class is that its members exhibit constant critical levels of well-being that are allowed to differ from the threshold of sufficiency. Our basic axiom assigns priority to those below the threshold, a property that is shared by numerous other sufficientarian approaches. When combined with the well-known strong Pareto principle and the assumption that there be a constant critical level, the axiom implies that the critical level cannot be below the threshold. The main results of the paper are characterizations of our new class and an important subclass. As a final observation, we identify the generalized critical-level sufficientarian orderings that permit us to avoid the repugnant conclusion and the sadistic conclusion, which are known as two fundamental challenges in population ethics.

Introduction Despite the abundance of evidence on climate change and its consequences on future generations, people, in general, are still reluctant to change their actions and behaviors toward the environment that would particularly benefit posterity. In this study, we took a preliminary step in a new research direction to explore humans' altruistic behavior toward future generations of people and whether it can be affected by dialogue. Methods We used an android robot called Telenoid as a representative of future generations by explaining that the robot is controlled by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) living in a simulation of our world in the future. To measure people's altruistic behavior toward it, we asked the participants to play a round of the Dictator Game with the Telenoid before having an interactive conversation with the Telenoid and then playing another round. Results On average, participants gave more money to the Telenoid in the second round (after having an interactive conversation). The average amount of money increased from 20% in the first to about 30% in the second round. Discussion The results indicate that the conversation with the robot might have been responsible for the change in altruistic behavior toward the Telenoid. Contrary to our expectations, the personality of the participants did not appear to have an influence on their change of behavior, but other factors might have contributed. We finally discuss the influence of other possible factors such as empathy and the appearance of the robot. However, the preliminary nature of this study should deter us from making any definitive conclusions, but the results are promising for establishing the ground for future experiments.

Abstract This paper provides a characterization of a new class of ordinal poverty measures that are defined by means of the aggregate generalized poverty gap. To be precise, we propose to use the sum of the differences between the transformed fixed poverty line and the transformed level of income of each person below the line as our measure. If the transformation is strictly concave, the resulting measure is strictly inequality averse with respect to the incomes of the poor. In analogy to some existing results on inequality measurement, we show that the only relative (scale-invariant) members of our class are based on strictly concave power functions or the natural logarithm. Moreover, we show that our measures allow for a useful decomposition that is akin to those examined in some earlier contributions. In an empirical analysis, we compare the logarithmic variant of our index to two well-established alternative orderings. Unlike numerous indices that appear in the earlier literature, ours do not explicitly depend on the number of poor or on the total population size, thereby ruling out any direct influence of the head-count ratio on poverty comparisons.